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Ford wrote a new playbook for social-media marketing with its first "Fiesta Movement" in 2009, but it didn't help sell the new Fiesta for very long.

So with the just-launched Fiesta Movement "Remix," Ford seems determined to use its social-media skills to sell significantly more Fiesta subcompacts as well as to stay ahead of the fastest-moving game in marketing.

This time, Ford plans to use the online content generated by 100 social-media influencers, in their unscripted experiences with the car over the next several weeks, as the entire palette of creative for a paid-media campaign around the launch of the 2014 Fiesta later this year.

"We're turning to our 100 Fiesta 'agents' and saying, 'We're going to use only your content for our ad campaign for the new Fiesta,'" Scott Monty, global head of social media for Ford, told me. "That's never been done before in the auto industry."

Fiesta Movement: A Social Remix also will include ties with prominent TV, entertainment and sports programing including American Idol and the X Games as well as the Bonnaroo music festival. And Ford will curate all the content generated by the bloggers and other Fiesta-driving digerati on a new web site.

Ford's original Fiesta Movement in 2009 was hailed for raising awareness of the Fiesta -- which was coming off a new global platform to the U.S. market for the first time -- to sky-high levels and setting a new, high bar for big brands' social-media marketing programs. It essentially kicked off a new era of digital marketing for the car business.

Propelled by the “Movement,” Fiesta enjoyed a steep takeoff, selling more than 23,000 units in just the second half of 2010, and soon skyrocketing by nearly 300 percent for all of 2011, to a total of more than 69,000 sales for the year.

Problem was, the initial burst of attention didn't create a long-term boom in sales for Fiesta. By last spring, Fiesta sales had begun slumping badly. For all of 2012, Fiesta sold 17 percent fewer units than a year earlier, sliding to under 57,000 sales overall (though in December they rose by more than 50 percent versus a weak year-earlier month, and ticked up by more than 20 percent last month).

At least a couple of factors were to blame for Fiesta's flame-out from social-media star to showroom bust. One was the introduction about a year ago of the new Ford Focus, a little bigger than Fiesta but not all that much more expensive; Focus's appeal and Ford's promotion of its bread-and-butter small sedan surely sapped thousands of sales from Fiesta.

Second, Fiesta began facing more competition in the subcompact sector, as $3-a-gallon-and-up gasoline became a staple of the American scene. Chevrolet's new Sonic, for instance, proved to be a worthy alternative.

Which brings us to the 2014 Fiesta. Monty told me that the Movement "remix" and eventual ads will generate content "about a lifestyle and everything in concert and in particular being able to get the value with Fiesta that we can prove to customers." Ford will do that by tasking the influencers "to say whatever they're going to say" based on monthly themes that each will be related to different aspects of the car's appeal and personality, including travel, adventure, entertainment, technology, a "healthy lifestyle" and "social activism."

From what it learned during the first Fiesta Movement, Monty explained, the brand needs to be careful to emphasize such "lifestyle" elements "rather than be in your face about product features. We think it's a more powerful approach because, ultimately, when someone buys a car -- and particularly someone in the target Fiesta demographic -- they're interested in what it can do to support their lifestyle, not whether it has this or that product feature.